Bailey traveled with owner Barbara Pence from the San Francisco Bay area to participate in the Champoeg State Park project.

Tom Banse
/ Northwest News Network

Originally published on September 30, 2017 10:38 am

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Some very special search dogs have been getting a workout in the Northwest. They’re trained to sniff out the remains of people buried as long as 9,000 years ago. This past week, their assignment was to find burials from the early Oregon Trail days.

A yellow Labrador and two border collies successively crisscrossed the old cemetery where there's just one headstone left. They searched heads down with their noses right at ground level.

"They're literally following their nose,” Morris said. “They sometimes will even run into a tree or a bush because they are following their nose."

Berkeley, one of the collies, stopped and made an alert pose. That was a signal to handler Lynne Angeloro. The signal meant Berkeley sniffed old human remains and the handler then marked the spot.

The dogs had a second assignment nearby to determine which of several possible locations could contain the remains of Kitty Newell. She was a Nez Perce woman who married a pioneer fur trapper. She died in 1845.

The canine team narrowed down where Newell was probably buried. An archaeology team will try to corroborate the dogs' work with other techniques such as ground penetrating radar or magnetometers.

A non-invasive search method

Ranger Dan Klug said park managers wanted a non-invasive way to find where people are buried in the history-rich area.

"In state parks, old water lines tend to break,” he said. “We need to dig below the surface to fix the water lines. But we are not allowed to dig in a historic area for fear of destroying cultural resources.”

It was archaeologist Chelsea Rose's idea to hire the sniffer dogs for a couple of days as part of longer archaeological survey of the state park. Rose works out of Southern Oregon University.

She'd heard about forensic search dogs, but had never used them before and was a little skeptical.

"We don't have any better option,” Rose said. “Our other option using metal detection or magnetometry would have the same questions, except we would also wonder if it was just a rusty nail down there. We wouldn't know if it was coffin hardware specifically, which would be what those things would be looking for. So I think this is a better indicator because in theory they are smelling human remains.”

The detection dogs have previously worked in the Pacific Northwest to search for Native American burials with the Spokane Tribe, the city of Sequim and Washington State Department of Transportation.

In addition to the Champoeg project, Berkeley has a claim to fame. He took part in a midsummer expedition to the South Pacific sponsored by National Geographic to search for the remains of lost aviator Amelia Earhart. Berkeley signaled at a possible grave site on Nikumaroro Atoll. A subsequent dig yielded fragmentary evidence which remains under investigation.